Nicholas Lemann, a student of the black exodus from the South into Chicago, identified a larger reaction of potent, cumulative effect. “The beginning of the modern rise of conservatism coincided exactly with the country’s beginning to realize the true magnitude and consequences of the black migration,” he wrote in 1991, adding that the influential neo-conservative movement was founded then “by former liberals who lost faith in large part over the issue of race in the North; in Irving Kristol’s famous apothegm, ‘a neo-conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality,’ it’s not difficult
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